The present invention relates to disk drives and, more particularly, to a small disk drive low in height and excellent in sealing properties.
Various types of portable recording mediums are provided for various devices including personal computers (PC) and digital cameras to store data. Efforts have been made in recent years to provide recording media having a small size and a large storage capacity. For example, a small, portable magnetic disk drive has been proposed. This proposed disk drive has a new assembly construction based on the Compact Flash® commercially available from SanDisk Corporation, i.e., one of standard small memory cards.
A large-capacity miniature hard magnetic disk drive conforming to the standard of Compact Flash Type 2 is provided with a one-inch diameter magnetic disk having a storage capacity of 1 GB, and has a weight on the order of only 16 g. The PC card to be used in combination with the disk drive, similarly to the disk drive, is based on standards such as the standards of Compact Flash Type 2. The disk drive can be inserted in the PC card.
This portable, miniature hard disk drive is provided, in addition to the magnetic disk (disk) for storing data, a spindle motor for rotating the disk, a read/write head for writing and reading data to and from the disk, and an actuator for moving the read/write head in a direction along a radius of the disk. Functional components including a disk, a spindle motor, a read/write head and an actuator of such a miniature hard disk drive having compact construction are formed very minutely. Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2002-15553 (pp. 5-6, FIGS. 3 and 4) discloses the assembly structure of a small disk drive, which meets Compact Flash standards.